of children and angels
by LightsPast
Summary: Written for The Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition round 13 - Some people manage to change their lives, some seek solutions in all the wrong places, and some never ask for help until it's far too late. This is a story of children and angels.


**Written for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition, Round Thirteen**

**Team: Montrose Magpies**

**Position: Chaser 3**

**Challenge: Write whatever your muse desires. No restrictions. Go crazy!**

**Prompts: Silver, Nightmare, Flaw**

**Words: 1, 467**

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_Don't tell me that you won't cry_

_To think of another life_

_ - Wasting Time, Press To Meco_

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i.

Victoire is _gorgeous_.

She is silky hair and shining eyes and skin like porcelain. She is delicate grace and soft words, perfect smile and sweet laughter.

She is radiant.

Victoire glows like liquid metal, cool and serene, the colour of the night stars. Hair of moonlight, and luminous features like that of an angel. Unearthly.

She is perfect.

Her eyes are like a clear river reflecting light. Even her teeth are an enviable shade of pale.

She is silver.

But Victoire doesn't want to be silver, cool and calm and soothing. She doesn't want to ebb and flow with the tide. Because silver is always second, always not-quite-good-enough, forgotten and lonely.

Silver blended into the background, among the other colours. So close to white, so close to grey. There is no life, no vibrancy when you are silver.

Victoire wants to be red and purple, yellow, pink, orange, blue. She wants to be green and violet. She wants to be _golden_.

But when you're silver, no one cares what you want.

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ii.

They said that no one is perfect, but Dominique knows that they were lying.

Dominique knows that perfection exists, because perfection lives in the bedroom right next to hers, and it goes by the name of Victoire Weasley.

Victoire is everything that is perfect, everything that Dominique is not.

Dominique remembers when she was a child, and no one gave a damn about what you looked like, they'd still play quidditch with you anyway. It was all about having fun, and no matter how hard she strains her memory, she can't recall a single instance in which she cared about her appearance.

But self-awareness increases with age and suddenly Dominique is fifteen and she hates herself, she hates her body. She stares in the mirror for hours and hours on end. She makes a mental list, points out every flaw. And oh, how many flaws there are.

She hates her eyes, grey grey grey. Flat, unchanging grey against the luminescence of Victoire's silver eyes. Her face is too round, her mouth is too big. Her teeth are too crooked and her nose is too small.

_Flawed, flawed, flawed._

She hates her arms, pale and flabby. Her stomach sticks out too far and her thighs are too wide.

_Flawed, flawed, flawed._

She wants and wishes, til she is green with envy. Why can't she just be as beautiful as Victoire?

She sighs and she weeps, she screams into her pillow at the dead of night. She cries until her eyes are red-rimmed and she is breathless.

She wants to change, but she doesn't know how. She strives towards the dreams that await in the distance, the image she wishes to see in the mirror but it begins to feel like the harder she struggles towards her goal, the further away it gets, until one day she will be left lying motionless and empty in the dust, wings broken and body wasted away.

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iii.

Louis is small and helpless against the strength of the world.

He is tired and broken, but no one can see his pain. He will not let them. His lips smile, even as the weight of his soul drags them down, and he grows out his fringe so he can flip it in front of his traitorous eyes, so they cannot betray him. He will not let them.

His father always called him his _champion._ His only son, his pride and joy. How can he let his father down?

He doesn't want to tell anyone about the darkness that clings to his thoughts, weighs them down, until simply getting out of bed and facing the day seems like an impossible, terrifying task. The darkness follows him everywhere, invisible to all other eyes. It grasps at his heels, tripping him, slowing him.

Sometimes Louis just wants to sit down and cry and cry and cry and cry and never get out of bed. He wants to ignore the rest of the world. He is afraid to get close to anyone, in case the darkness consumes them too, but he hates to be alone. Louis longs for the feeling to not feel at all.

But in the moments he does feel nothing at all, he is empty, a broken doll, and that is worse than anything else he has ever felt. But the feelings soon come back, and then he craves that horrible, wonderful blankness all over again.

He is trapped in a living nightmare, an endless race 'round and 'round a spiral, and the closer to the center he gets, the more afraid he becomes.

Sometimes, at night he will climb onto the roof and stand there staring at the sky. Louis watches the stars and thinks about how they don't care at all.

He touches his back between his shoulder blades, and feels the empty space where wings should be.

Louis wonders how it would feel to fly, but he knows he's far more likely to find out how it feels to fall.

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iv.

Victoire is tired of gorgeous. She fed-up with luminous, radiant, glowing, brilliant, perfect.

She is sick of silver.

She is no longer a child, awed and content with her liquid-metal beauty. She is no angel.

Victoire decides it's about time she throws away her halo.

So, one summer afternoon in Diagon Alley, she slips off, mumbling something about catching up with school friends to distract her parents from her true intentions.

She finds a small hair salon off the main street, and deems it perfect. Forty-five minutes later she emerges with a hot-pink pixie cut and just enough galleons left over for a nose piercing.

She can't stop the grin that is spreading across her face, reaching up to ruffle her new, light hairdo.

Oh, she can't _wait _to show Teddy.

Her confidence is contagious and slowly, her wings unfurl, strong and lovely.

She is not an angel, but in this moment she feels as though she could fly.

* * *

v.

Once a boy called Dominique an angel, and she laughed bitterly, wildly, until tears ran down her hollowed cheeks.

She was no angel. Angels were beautiful and radiant and they didn't hate themselves. Their souls weren't choked with the weed of envy.

Oh no, Dominique is not an angel. She is a walking skeleton. She is angry and spiteful, sorrowful and lonely. Her mouth could have been a rose, but instead it is twisted in self-loathing, self-hatred.

She is still but a child, no matter how many burdens she shoulders alone.

She thought that her resentment towards her sister would fade with the years, that maybe she would no longer covet beauty so desperately. But nothing has changed.

She is reckless, she doesn't care, she kisses and runs away. She wants to find someone special, someone who will tell her she is beautiful and mean it. But her desires twisted and warped and her intentions have strayed.

A trail of smashed hearts litter her path, as she abandons each lover on the ground and uses them to climb higher, desperate to reach the sky.

She can't find her wings, so she uses the strength of others to propel herself skyward in hopes that one day, she too may fly.

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vi.

Louis wants help, he wants it to end, but he doesn't know how to ask, he doesn't know how to stop it.

His body can no longer support the weight of his soul – he is no Atlas, his back breaks under the world. He cannot taste the starlight and breathe the clouds. He is grounded, stuck on the earth. The darkness snakes its way around his ankles, and if he tries to jump it simply pulls him back, crashing to the ground once more.

He tosses in his bed at night, his mind filled with fever dreams, visions of flying, soaring above the clouds. But he knows that he is drifting dangerously close to the sun, and his fragile wings, wings of glass, wings of wax and feather, may just shatter and melt.

The higher Louis gets, the closer he gets to the sky, the sun, the lower he sinks. He is drowning.

He is flying.

He is drowning.

He is flying.

He is drowning.

Up and down, up and down, up and down down down.

He reaches out a hand, a silent plea, but there is no one there to grasp it. No one can hear a voice crying for help when its tongue is trained with denial.

It is so hard. Louis wants to give up. He wants to cry and sleep until one day he will wake up and the world will be as bright and full of hope and possibility as it once was, when he was a child.

He wants to spread his wings and soar into a sky of colour.

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**This turned out a lot different from my original intentions, but I quite like it.**

**Happy summer/winter everyone! Please leave a review, it only takes a second and they brighten up my day (:**

**New A/N: Fixed up my tenses, they were crazy..**


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